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Fallen In Love With Your Freezer Yet?

Looking back into my archives, I realised that I started building up my freezer inventory in earnest in July 2007. Since then, there was no turning back. What I cook and how we eat has very much changed. For the better of course!

My freezer is now so very important, that I dread the day it will whole fridge die on me. *touch wood!* So much so, that I am contemplating buying a standalone freezer. I found out that some breastfeeding mommies buy such freezers solely for storing excess breastmilk, maybe I should get second-hand from them when they are done with their freezers?

Anyway, I quote from Nigella Lawson's How To Eat: "The freezer can easily become a culinary graveyard, a place where good food goes to die." This was very true even for me long before I realised the usefulness of the freezer.

I have been asked by friends how I freeze this and that, so I thought that maybe I should share in more details what are the things that I stash in my freezer and hopefully you would find a better use for yours too.

From my point of view, things that can be frozen are generally grouped into cooked and uncooked meat and vegetables. As I don't really like the texture of frozen uncooked vegetables, I have only frozen meat items so far.

As much as I would like to say leftovers are good candidates for freezer, I would like to caution that nobody likes leftovers of not-so-nice dishes. So don't hesistate to dump them cos they are simply not worth the freezer space. Trust me, I paid tuition fees for this.

I like to keep cooked items in the freezer for a simple reason: they keep much longer than raw. A good example is salmon. From what I gathered online, fatty fish doesn't keep well for too long unless you have sushi restuarant freezers. So when a big fillet of salmon comes in from the market, I would immediate cut it up for pan fry and set one portion for baking for the following day. Those pan fried salmon would be portioned and into the freezer they go. These are super handy for lunchbox and also on days when I am too lazy to cook from scratch.

Another cooked item which I regularly have is the cooked ground meat mix. I don't really know how best to describe this. I would usually head down to the supermarket and check out the ground meat section to see which is on offer. Then I would typically pick up about half a kilo. I usually brown the ground meat and then add vegetables such as carrots, lotus roots or mushrooms to it. As a standalone dish, it is well balanced. But more importantly, this serves as a good base for more dishes such as noodles, fried rice, omelettes, etc.

~~ PORTIONING ~~

All the items are packed in individual serving portions. So it depends on how many people you are cooking for and what is their preference. For example, I would freeze 3 drumlets and 3 wings as a portion. Fish fillets are cut to a single serving for steaming or frying.

In the future posts, I will disucss more about how to package food for freezing and also some of the recipes that I use often. I'm still stumbling along on this, so please bear with me.

Prep ahead
Although salads needs minimal cooking, it involves lots of knife-work. Slicing, dicing, chopping all take time. But as I've mentioned earlier, most ingredients of a salad can be prepared in advance, but not all. Cut avocados will turn black, apples brown, and so forth. So if you are considering these items for your salad, either wait until just before serving to dice them up or leave them out. Th…

My motivation for looking into main course salad was born out of sheer laziness. I was looking for a one-dish meal (less plates) that requires minimal cooking (less pots/pans) and packs lots of veggies as well as being filling. No skimpy wimpy diet salads for this gal.

So if I have to put this into a checklist of evaluating a salad, it would probably look like this.

Salade Nicoise has all the ticks in the check-boxes. Everything in this salad can be made ahead of time. Right down to the proteins of eggs and fish (either canned tuna or leftover grilled salmon). Now, isn't this dish time friendly?

These are the first batch of blueberry scones from our new oven.I found some leftover buttermilk from previous pancake making session and also a bit of plain yogurt sitting around in the fridge.As I have said umpteen times here that I am the least creative person in the world, I just stuck to making what I know. And what I know is that scones and muffins can be made from any sort of dairy products. So I mixed the yogurt into the buttermilk and add the mixture into the dry ingredients.Voila!Airy, crumbly and tangy scones.Arghhh … this photo doesn’t do justice to the scones. I have, erm …. somehow, misplaced my big girl camera during the move. I am quite sure it is sitting somewhere around. (I hope!)Enjoying these for breakfasts and/or tea breaks is one of the best things I like during hectic days. Especially when it is toasty and with a big cup of tea.